Sun and Shadow
by Smarty Cat
Summary: [Oneshot] On the shores of a lonely beach, sun and shadow meet. 1xR LIME Please heed the M rating. ALL comments and criticisms are welcome.


**Please note: As of November 2011, ALL NEW FICS unrelated to previously posted works will be posted under the name Inverse Calico. A link is on my author profile.**

_Please heed the R rating!_This was my super fluffy entry in the 2005 Church of Lemons over on the Love Reflection II mailing list. This fic does contain content of a sexual nature although it has been edited to comply with FFN regulations (about 400 words gone bye bye). A link to the full version is in my profile or you can read it at Blissful Ignorance or AO3.

**Disclaimer:** Gundam Wing is owned by Sunrise and Sotsu Agency and distributed in America exclusively under license by Bandai Entertainment. I own nothing but the dvds and the manga.

**Completed:**February 14, 2005

_The Black Rose's Livejournal avatar made me do it__.  
__A special thank you goes to Crystaltear for concrit on the original abrupt ending._

**Sun and Shadow **

by  
**Smarty Cat  
**  
Peace dwelt in the distant cries of the gulls and in the ocean breeze that sent the ceiling fan lazily spinning. Serenity lay in the easy lapping of the surf on the shore. Tranquility resided in the sunbeams heating her skin. What a wonderful way to awaken! Relena felt more relaxed and at peace than she had in the days when she was still a student and her greatest concern had been whether her father would be present for her birthday. She snuggled into the light cotton sheets draped over her body and breathed a sigh of contentment, turning her face up into the warm glow of the sun.

The gentle creaking of aged wooden floorboards provided the first clue she had of his presence in the room with her, the sudden dimming of the crimson glow behind her closed eyelids the second. Her brow furrowed and a whimper of protest vibrated in her throat as her arm wove out of her sheltering cocoon of bed linens, in search of the source of the darkness. Warm fingers closed around her seeking hand and intertwined with her fingers. She squeezed and there was pressure in return, solid and comforting.

"You're blocking the sun," she complained without opening her eyes. Her tone was husky and sleepily plaintive, but her lips curled into a smile of their own accord. She would know his touch anywhere. The chemistry of his bare skin against her own was unmistakably and indelibly imprinted onto her memory.

The side of the bed dipped as extra weight settled at its edge, and gravity pulled her unresisting body down that gentle incline to settle against the solid mass of his hip and leg. She curled around his figure, drawing her knees up against his rear and spooning her body against his, her free hand seeking and finding his bent knee. The thin material of whatever pants he was wearing did nothing to alleviate his body heat seeping into her own.

His hand briefly touched the curve of her cheek before stroking her hair away from her face. "It's late," he stated, voice deep and flat.

"I know," Relena replied as she allowed herself to indulge in a delightful little shiver. That sense of satisfaction carried through to her tone as she smugly repeated, "You're blocking the sun. And for that to be possible it must be late indeed. This room faces west."

"You should get up then," he responded with near infinite patience, loosening his grip on her hand to stroke his fingers across her knuckles.

She pulled his arm closer to her, abandoning her hold on his knee to cradle his hand with both of hers and pressing a kiss to the back of it, her eyes still closed. "Why should I want to get up? You're here now." She gave his arm a light tug. "Come back to bed."

"No."

Her eyes opened into thin blue slits lit by a speculative gleam at his easy dismissal. "Could I tempt you?" she inquired curiously.

"No," he repeated, just as unequivocally as the first time.

She laughed then, gay and silvery, and released his hand. Relena sat up briskly, letting the sheets fall away and allowing the sea breeze to tug at the light material of her chemise and skitter across her bare skin as she faced him. She met his gaze calmly and directly. "I consider myself thoroughly chided and rejected then. Chided, rejected, and challenged," she added on a purr, and his lips twitched in response.

She scooted closer to him, and the fingers of her left hand walked up the warm and slightly moist expanse of his back to tangle themselves in the fine hairs at the nape of his neck. She sighed wistfully. Heero's hair was getting unruly even by his standards. He would have to cut it soon, and then she would have to wait months before she could twirl and tease it like this again. Such idle thoughts chased themselves in her mind as the damp, dark strands alternately sifted and clung to her fingers, and she dispelled them by lightly scraping her nails across the back of his neck and feeling his body stiffen beneath her touch.

The breath-stealing feeling of subtle desire and total awareness of the male at her side returned then, and her tongue traced the contour of her lower lip as her breathing shallowed. Only the faintest brush of her fingertip against his jaw line was necessary to turn his face to her, and she guided his mouth to hers. His hands curled around her thighs and started edging the hem of her chemise upwards as their kiss threatened to deepen, but Relena pulled away. The taste of salt lingered on his lips, and she touched her own, glancing at him shrewdly over her upraised hand.

"You've been swimming without me," she murmured huskily.

Heero folded his arms across his chest. "You were asleep."

"Clever, aren't you? You could have woken me up."

He shook his head briefly. "You were tired, and your body needed to recover from the jet lag. So I let you rest."

Relena fell back onto the bed with a sound of exasperation and flung her arms above her head, her hair spreading around her in a messy golden halo and the right side of her chemise falling indecently low. She stared at him petulantly. "If you're going to be considerate at least go back and dunk yourself and then stand in the doorway wet and dripping so I can admire you properly."

One dark brow arched parallel to a dangerously narrowed blue eye as he traced the fallen shoulder strap of her chemise with his fingers before sliding it up her arm to its proper place with excruciating slowness. "That could go both ways, you know. I might wish to admire you properly wet and dripping," he mimicked, voice growing raspy towards the end of his sentence.

Relena might as well not be wearing anything at all the way his eyes burned through her clothes and flushed her skin, but she was never one to let embarrassment leave her at a disadvantage when facing an opponent. She shrugged his hand off her shoulder, and lifted her chin, eyes sparking. "No, it cannot go both ways. You refuse to come back to bed. I am not leaving it unless by force. In addition, even if you meant your remark as an innuendo, which I did not, you are still putting my clothes back on me, which, while immensely touching, is not what I currently want to occur."

Heero lunged at her before her words had faded in the air between them, and Relena was not particularly surprised when he forcibly hauled her body up off the bed and nipped at her lips before slinging her over his shoulder. For seven years they had worked together in one form or another, and they had shared a bed and their bodies for the last four. After the initial hesitance of a newly blossomed physical relationship, he had become as comfortable with her body as she was with his own, although admittedly a bit more gentle. The man had a near complete lack of manners and social boundaries. It wasn't that he was unaware of them; he simply did not care. Tact had never been his strong point. Still, she could quell him with a word, and although she complained and thrashed about in his grasp as he strode down the deck steps of their beach house and set off across the sand, the words "no" and "stop" never once passed her lips.

She did gasp loudly, however, when the first breakers closed around his hips. Slung over his should as she was, the water thoroughly soaked her hair, nearly reached her face, and was frigid in comparison to the warm air. All in all, it was not a position that Relena wished to remain in, particularly since the water level was only likely to get higher the farther out he walked. Confident that her lover had long since stopped planning her demise, did not realize the extent of the danger in which he had placed her, and would forgive any damage to his person necessary to save herself, she clawed at his back in her struggles to rise above the waves and ultimately right herself. That her hands managed to slip into his waistband, one slipping the cloth over his hips and the other raking the top of a firmly muscled buttock, was nearly accidental.

Relena found herself properly upright and in front of Heero in a matter of seconds, the same number of seconds that it took for his lips to crash down on her own. Unlike the kiss she had initiated earlier, Heero made no pretense of keeping it chaste. His hands closed on her upper arms tightly enough to bruise as his tongue swept through her mouth and tangled with her own. A lightning flash of intensity that bordered on violent, it ended nearly as quickly as it had began.

He pushed her away to arms' length and glared at her from beneath the shadows of his wind-ruffled hair. "Don't do that again," he warned.

She realized distantly that there was no sand beneath her feet. Only his grip on her arms held her afloat in the gently lapping waves. Other more pressing matters required her attention first though, and she stared in somewhat dazed fascination at the pulse flickering in the hollow of his throat. Heero shook her, and her gaze jumped to his face as his warning finally registered in her consciousness. Relena laughed breathlessly and stretched her newly swollen lips into a crooked smile.

"Oh, believe me, I shall," she promised, tossing her head to free the hairs clinging to her damp face, and looking around them. Heero had not been walking straight out into the ocean as she had imagined. The path he had chosen from the beach house angled through the shallow water of the shoreline toward an outcrop of rocks jutting out into the sea. "Where are you taking me?"

"There." He inclined his head towards the rocks as he resumed wading, towing her along behind him. "To a place where sun meets shadow."

Relena eyed their surroundings inquisitively as he carefully guided her up a sloping jumble of barnacle encrusted boulders. The way was wet and slippery, and she took extra caution to step carefully due to bare feet that were far more delicate than those of the man leading her. His hand clasped around hers was steady though, and her concentration was not so complete that she missed smiling at a few crabs trapped in a tide pool as they scuttled away from the human pair's shadows.

The ocean water had carved out a natural grotto of sorts higher in the rock formation, and the far edge of it jutted out into the open air. Heero's hand dropped from hers, and she stepped forward with an awed gasp. The horizon stretched out in front of her eyes without any obstruction, and the combination of rock and tide pools created the illusion that land, sea, and air, sunlight and shadow, merged seamlessly into one infinite entity.

"Oh, Heero!" she breathed as she felt him approach at her back. "It's magnificent, absolutely stunning!" She sank to her knees, and he sat down slightly behind her in the shadows and patiently waited with his hand resting on her ankle as her eyes drank their fill of the dramatic vista. The stone beneath her was warmed and dried by the sun, and her fingers flexed against its surface as she twisted to look back at him, a tinge of worry born of practicality creasing her eyebrows. "You have taken the tide into account, haven't you?"

The wry grin she so cherished flashed across his face. The atmosphere around them shifted then although there was no obvious difference from what had been mere moments before. It was in the way the pressure of his touch changed on her skin, the way she suddenly became hypersensitive to his proximity. She turned, facing him fully, and his hand slipped off of her leg, leaving a trail of fiery sensation in its wake. Her lips parted as a stray beam of light revealed his eyes to be a darker blue than usual, pupils dilated to their widest point.

He loomed over her, dark and thrilling and cloaked in shadow, his arms braced on either side of her body as he closed the distance between them, and she yielded willingly before him, sinking back onto the sun-warmed stone and exposing her throat to his seeking lips. His teeth scraped delicately down the column of her neck and his hands stroked down the curves of her hips as his weight settled against her. Her legs parted to cradle him against the center of her body, and Relena sighed with satisfaction as his teeth closed over the pesky right strap of her chemise and finally began pulling the garment down her body. One hand abandoned its place at her hip to tug the other strap down as well, and she pulled her arms free and wrapped them around his shoulders, fingers once again tangling in his hair as she urged him lower still.

Heero refused to be rushed, however, removing her hands from his hair and intertwining their fingers, and his perusal of her body was languid and slow. He was nothing if not methodical and exceptionally thorough, and he regularly made such complete mappings of her skin during their lovemaking. It was the sweetest kind of torture, particularly since he insisted on restricting her own access to his body during such times, and she writhed below him, panting with need.

"Heero, please!"

He lifted his head and stared at her across her belly and breasts, his eyes so dark they were almost black.

"Please," she repeated, trying to lift her hands to touch him. She had never desired anything more than she wanted to feel him against her fully now, skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat, breath to breath.

What was Relena without her Heero? What was the sunlight without the shadow? Incomplete. Unfinished. Lonely.

Heero clutched her suddenly and dragged her body tightly against his, almost to the point of pain. He exhaled harshly into her mouth as he climaxed. Her eyes flew wide, disappointment at being left unfulfilled dying before it ever had a chance to truly surface, as the touch of his hand sent her plummeting over the edge. She buckled over him with a sob, her teeth closing on the smooth skin of his shoulder as she suppressed a scream of pleasure.

The effort left her shaking, and he stroked her back soothingly as they both composed themselves. Relena sighed deeply, with pure feminine satisfaction, and pressed an apologetic kiss to the dental imprints she had left on his shoulder. The play of his hands on the skin of her back did not change in any way, and she lifted her head curiously. He was staring off into the golden horizon. Heero's gaze was not focused on her or on anything that could actually be seen, she realized. She turned in his arms and tapped his cheek with her index finger.

Heero blinked and seemed to shake himself out of a stupor. "Do you remember when we first met?" he asked quietly.

Relena blinked. That was a response she had not expected, and she could not conceal the dry amusement from her voice as she replied, "It was one of the more memorable moments in my life, yes. One that irrevocably changed my life." Was he pensive? "Why? I hadn't thought it would hold any special significance for you."

"I'm here, aren't I?" He glanced at her from the corners of his eyes and mumbled something. Her eyebrows lifted in confusion, and he repeated the word at a more audible volume. "Beaches. And sunlight," he added.

"What?"

"You're like beaches and sunlight," Heero elaborated, looking extremely uncomfortable at this disclosure of information.

"I don't understand."

He touched her hair and laid a hand against her face, seeming to study the contrast of their skin colors before gliding the pads of his first two fingers around the edges of her eye. "Golden hair. Skin pale as white sand. Eyes where ocean meets sky. There's no shadow in you."

"Oh, Heero, of course there is! Everyone has shadows just like everyone has sunlight. Maybe the shadows aren't dark, maybe the sun is dim, maybe they are well hidden, but they are there. They are." Her expression softened, and she removed his hand from her face and pressed a kiss against his palm. "What brought this one? You're acting quite unusual. A romantic getaway just for two, a hidden grotto, and the sudden use of metaphor to describe psychological states. Is something wrong?"

"I can't be romantic?"

"You are practical and literal far more often than you've ever been romantic and metaphorical. I don't know how to deal with a romantic Heero."

He snorted as if to say that she had dealt well enough, and she arched her eyebrows primly, ignoring for the moment that her chemise was bunched around her waist and he was completely naked. "Nothing's wrong, Relena. I'm," he hesitated, his fingers restlessly teasing their linked hands and looked away, "happy."

"I'm happy too," Relena whispered, fighting back tears. His voice had made it clear that he had never expected happiness, and she cried for him inside.

He glanced back at her, the ghost of a shy smile adorning his lips. "When sun meets shadow, they're on equal terms, right?"

"They can't exist without each other. Without light, there is no shadow, and without shadow, how would we know that light is?" Relena turned completely around in his lap and settled her head in the crook of his shoulder. She pressed her cheek against his and squeezed his hands, before disentangling her grip on one so that she could point up at the sky and the vivid trails of color left by the setting sun. "Look there. Sun and shadow meet, become one, and make something new. Something new and more magnificent than either shadow or sun alone."

His free hand stroked the gentle curve of her lower stomach as he murmured in her ear, "Like us?"

She turned her head and nuzzled his cheek, covering the large hand splayed across her softly rounded stomach with her own smaller one. "Exactly like us."


End file.
